


wash the dirt from our hands

by cynna



Category: Dungeons and Daddies (Podcast)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25617964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cynna/pseuds/cynna
Summary: Grant talks, or doesn't talk, really. Terry listens.
Relationships: Terry Jr. & Grant Wilson (Dungeons and Daddies)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 67





	wash the dirt from our hands

**Author's Note:**

> hey hi hello this is my first dndaddies fic and i'm full of fear!! i've been wanting to write something about/for grant basically since i started listening to the podcast and the convo-block moment between he and terry really kicked me into action. this can be read as just friendship or pre-shippy! un-beta'd, because i am an island among a sea of friends who haven't listened to the podcast (yet)
> 
> brief warning for some vague references to being closeted, and grant's typical self-harm adjacent habits
> 
> oh goodness i hope y'all like!

The watch doesn’t fit. This feels, to Grant, like a failure. 

When he lets his arm drop, the watch rattles just loud enough to be heard over the waterfall and slips down around his hand, turns the face around and under. The band catches the early evening sun, glints and reflects it into Grant’s eyes in this offensively cheerful way. It’s _old_ , but it’s obviously been well taken care of. Buffed and shined meticulously. He wonders how his dad's been finding the time to keep it so clean.

His feet are dangling in the pool and the waterfall is a rush of white noise in his ears and the water itself is soothing in its own way. A hum that deafens the static in his own brain. It’s something to focus on, at the very least. Days or weeks or months ago, before they’d ended up in Faerûn, he remembers digging around on the internet for mindfulness exercises; focusing on a sound or a sight or a smell and on only that until some sense of _presence_ comes back.

It’s working, kind of. The water-rush is loud enough that it’s difficult to really focus on anything else at the very least.

Still, it’s hard to look away from the watch. Though looking definitely isn’t helping.

He tries breathing slow and counting the seconds as they pass, tries to focus on the way the sun is angling lower and lower. The light filtering through trees, glittering across the water. There’s so much to take in but he can’t seem to make himself look at anything but the shine of the watch. 

He starts fidgeting with it. Twisting it around his wrist for something to do with his hands, wincing when the links of it catch the soft hair on his arm. Wincing and then exhaling when he realizes the sting has him focusing sharply.

So he doesn’t stop. Keeps rolling the watch around and around, mindful of the way it drags and catches on his skin.

The sun sinks lower. Grant feels strangely calm; even when he hears footsteps in the grass he doesn’t turn. Half of him thinks it’s because if it’d been danger, someone would’ve already warned him. The other half of him, no matter how calm he is, thinks if it’s danger then _good._

“Hey.”

He doesn’t lift his head and he doesn’t invite Terry to sit but Terry sits anyway. He’s barefoot, too, lets his feet slip into the pool a polite distance from Grant’s. Terry’s good like that. Good about personal space.

“Sup,” Grant manages. His eyes stay on the band of the watch, catching the light, glittering faintly. 

“Just came to sit,” Terry says. “That cool?”

Grant says, “Yeah,” without really thinking about it. He’s not averse to company. Indifferent to it at best. 

It’s difficult to muster up feeling much of anything.

Terry lets out an uncharacteristically noisy sigh and settles back, kicks his feet in the water just enough to dissuade a couple of minnows from nibbling his toes. The sun’s getting low to their right, glittering across the pool, across the watch. Grant wonders how far his dad’s gotten. 

“It’s quiet without the twins,” Terry says. 

Grant hums. He fiddles with the watch. Twists it over and over and around his wrist until it starts chafing at his skin.

Terry sighs again and folds forward, chest-to-knees, dips his fingertips into the water. Grant watches him distantly from the corner of his eye. He feels a little like if he cared to try he could slip away. Float out of body, out of mind, detach himself.

“I don’t want to push,” Terry starts, and then stops to sit back up and prop his elbow on his thigh and his chin on his fist. 

_Then don’t,_ Grant thinks, but doesn’t say. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until now. Hadn’t realized how tired he is of talking.

“I just wanted you to know we can talk about, you know, whatever. Whenever you’re ready to.” 

It’s not surprising, but the way it catches in Grant’s throat like a fishhook throws him off balance. The way that he almost _wants_ to talk. The way the caring is beautiful and bright and warm and safe. And his mouth opens, half against his will, because _yeah,_ he could tell Terry about what happened. He could tell Terry about Paeden and the football game and — 

Ah. And then he thinks of Yeet. 

The absolute torrent that had spilled from him. Words that, once they’d started coming, wouldn’t _stop_ coming, and the humiliation that had followed quick on the coattails of what had been pure and stupid honesty. 

He’d been so very, very stupid. Scraped himself out and offered himself up, some fragile starling nesting in his chest, cupped so careful in his hands and then refused. He thought he’d been okay. He thought after talking to his dad, after coming back to be with the other kids — maybe things could’ve been normal. He thought something had shifted, cracked back into place like a dislocated joint. 

That, apparently, isn’t the case. 

He feels wound tight inside, shuddering and hollow and twisted up and _sick._ He kicks his heel against a root sticking out from the dirt underwater. His hand goes tight around the watch and grinds it into the jut of his wrist bone. He forces his breath out through his nose.

“Grant?”

His eyes are closed. His eyes are closed and he can’t make them open because if he does he’ll overflow — and the numbness is almost preferable to this. It’s not at all a relief to _feel,_ to flood and boil and steam. 

“Uh-huh,” he says.

Terry makes a noise and Grant can feel his eyes on him this time. 

“Grant, could I-,”

_Could I kiss you?_

It’s his own voice in his skull, an echo, discordant. For a moment Grant is one-hundred-percent sure that he’s going to throw up. He’s going to puke in his lap and he’s never going to kiss anyone, he’s never, ever going to want to kiss anyone but _Yeet_ — 

“...can I hug you?”

And he doesn’t puke. It catches him by surprise but he _laughs,_ this bitter, cracking thing that is closer to a sob than not but he’s nodding. Still clutching at the watch and nodding with his eyes closed and tipping to one side until Terry wraps an arm around him and pulls him in close.

Terry’s hand ends up on his shoulder. 

“We don’t have to talk about anything,” Terry is saying. “But it helps sometimes. And you have us - all of us, to listen.”

A pause. An achingly gentle, only sort of awkward brush of fingers through Grant’s hair.

“You’ve got me,” Terry says, and he leans his cheek against the top of Grant’s head like he’s his mother and not a teammate, not someone he’d been thrown into another universe with.

“Thanks,” Grant says through his teeth. “It’s - not now,” he manages to say, though his jaw feels like it’s cranked shut. “Not now but - I want to. Talk. I mean.”

“Okay,” Terry says. His voice is so soft, so _kind,_ that Grant is abruptly struck with a deep and aching longing for home.

The realization comes slow, but he’s starting to understand that it isn’t his home that he misses. Not home, not his mom. It’s the normalcy. The routine of school-soccer-sleep, how easy it’d been to tamp down how he’d been feeling about _boys._ Here it hasn’t been easy. He’s been too obvious, too out of his own element to rein himself in and he knows he’s lucky that he hadn’t had to _say it_ outright but he just wants that _back._ He wants, god, he just — 

“I wanna go home,” Grant says. It comes out wobbling and brittle and wet. His eyes are burning behind the lids, prickling, unshed tears. He doesn’t want to cry.

“Me too, man,” Terry says, and he presses this tiny, soft kiss to the top of his head, and that’s what tips him over. 

Terry doesn’t try to pull away when Grant starts crying. He doesn’t move at all except to rub at Grant’s shoulder, up and down. Terry just sits there with him like he’s worth that, like he’s worth the time and the energy and thinking that he might be something worthwhile only makes him cry harder.

And the sun’s nearly set when Grant gets himself under control enough to pull back a bit. His cheek is wet and sticking to Terry’s shirt and he can’t meet Terry’s eyes just yet so he bends and cups water from the pool in his hands to splash at his face. It’s cool, and cleansing in a more significant way. Like he’s washing away something more than tears and snot. 

“Sometimes crying can feel pretty good,” Terry says quietly. Grant glances back at him — leaning back on his palms, staring pointedly away with the remnants of the sun in a halo behind him. 

“Sure feels like something,” Grant mutters, unthinking, and then realizes that it’s not untrue at all. He feels hollow, yes, sort of vacant and very, very tired but those are all very much human things to feel. The dissonance between the hollowness and the sudden _presentness_ is jarring but it’s not _bad._

_I’m here._

He splashes his face again and the water drips under his shirt collar. He can feel every drop of it and it is so, so good.

“I do want to talk,” Grant says when he’s sure his voice isn’t going to crack. “Not… tonight, maybe. But I do want to.”

“Door’s always open,” Terry tells him without missing a beat. Entirely sincere. And with anyone else Grant’s not sure he would believe it, but with Terry — yeah. Yeah, Grant can see it. He can see himself talking to Terry, really _talking._ Not word-vomiting all over himself in a desperate attempt to get it all out but talking through it, working through it, getting through it.

Grant nudges Terry’s shoulder with his own, and he can’t make himself look up but he manages to mumble, “Thank you,” to his knees.

“Any time,” Terry says, and Grant believes him.

**Author's Note:**

> some notes... i like the idea of them having like. a really good conversation about everything that's happened, but also speaking from experience (i'm not projecting on this boy i swear (jk i sure am)) having a moment like what happened with yeet there's this sense of fear and humiliation that i've found carries over into future conversations. so i think that grant WILL talk about things, but not... immediately. he'll get there. i know he will, blessed boy
> 
> also-also i have left out the 'jr' in terry's name because in my heart i feel that in grant's internal-monologue terry is The Terry not just... terry the second. that's me onion on that 
> 
> anyway!! i have a tumblr that i don't use a ton but if you'd like to come say hi i'm over at [cynku @ tumblr](http://cynku.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> thank you for reading <3


End file.
